Exhausting Life Quotes & Sayings

The truth is that few of us are born into this work. It is something we discover accidentally, something that happens gradually. We get a glimpse of this unusual life and this extraordinary profession, and we want to keep doing it, no matter how exhausting, stressful, or dangerous it becomes. It is the way we make a living, but it feels more like a responsibility, or a calling. It makes us happy, because it gives us a sense of purpose. We bear witness to history, and influence policy. — Lynsey Addario

Even though modern life in many ways is nothing short of exhausting, we need to take responsibility for what is necessary to combat the stress and exhaustion of modern life. — Marianne Williamson

There were moments ... when it seemed that all one could be asked was just to keep the ashtrays clean, the bed made, the wastebaskets emptied, as if one never got to the real things because of the constant exhausting battle to keep ordinary life from falling apart. — May Sarton

Having integrity is about being the same person on the inside that we are on the outside, and if we don't have integrity, life becomes exhausting. — Donald Miller

Yes, these are the thoughts that occupy my brain on a daily basis: How many steps to take. How many hairbrush strokes. Making sure I line up my proofreading pens just so. Making sure my make-up is just so. Sitting in my fucking desk chair just so. It's exhausting living a "just so" life. And I don't want to do it, but the idea of not counting, not arranging, not tic-ing sends my heart reeling with anxiety. — S. Walden

When I tried to meet some impossible standard for motherhood, tried to earn my way to a weird sort of Proverbs 31 Woman Club, I collapsed in exhaustion and simmering anger, sadness, and failure. This was not life in the Vine, this exhausting job description; this was not the Kingdom of God, let alone a redeemed woman living full. This was the shell of someone trying to measure up, trying to earn through her mothering what God had already freely given. This was someone feeling the weight of unmet expectations from the Church and her own self and the world all at once. — Sarah Bessey

But I have my life, I'm living it. It's twisted, exhausting, uncertain, and full of guilt, but nonetheless, there's something there. — Banana Yoshimoto

No matter how tired you are, no matter how physically exhausting this work may be, it's beautiful to bring a smile into someone's life, to care for someone in need. What greater joy can there be? — Mother Teresa

Raising human offspring is an endeavor nothing less than a continued labor of patience, hard work, organization and ongoing adaptation. All of which is unlike that expected of any other living creatures on the planet (or this sector of the universe, as far as we can tell). It demands the most complex responsibility and long-term commitment of any parenting life-form. Indeed, it is at times, at least for quality parents, an overwhelming, exhausting, even daunting task. Albeit, one that in the end, (and, most of the time even in the middle of it), is more than worth it. — Connie Kerbs

To have that concentration to act well is like lugging things up staircases in your brain. I think that's a thing people don't understand. It is that exhausting. If you're doing it well, if you're concentrating the way you need to, if your will and your concentration and emotional and imagination and emotional life are all in tune, concentrated and working together in that role, that is just like lugging weights upstairs with your head ... And I don't think that should get any easier. — Philip Seymour Hoffman

Silence and solitude are universally recognized spiritual practices, and there are good reasons for this. Learning how to discipline your speech is a way of preventing your energies from spilling out of you through the rupture of your mouth, exhausting you and filling the world with words, words, words instead of serenity, peace and bliss. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Often, when forced from his hammock by exhausting and intolerably vivid dreams of the night, which, resuming his own intense thoughts through the day, carried them on amid a clashing of phrensies, and whirled them round and round in his blazing brain, till the very throbbing of his lifespot became insufferable anguish; and when, as was sometimes the case, these spritual throes in him heaved his being up from its base, and a chasm seemed opening in him, from which forked flames and lightnings shot up, and accursed fiends beconed him to leap down among them; when this hell in himself yawned beneath him, a wild cry would be heard through the ship; and with glaring eyes Ahab would burst from his state room, as though escaping from a bed that was on fire. — Herman Melville

I remembered what Dad said once, that some people have all of life's answers worked out the day they're born and there's no use trying to teach them anything new. "They're closed for business even though, somewhat confusingly, their doors open at eleven, Monday through Friday," Dad said. And the trying to change what they think, the attempt to explain, the hope they'll come to see your side of things, it was exhausting, because it never made a dent and afterward you only ached unbearably. It was like being a Prisoner in a Maximum-Security Prison, wanting to know what a Visitor's hand felt like (see Living in Darkness, Cowell, 1967). No matter how desperately you wanted to know, pressing your dumb palm against the glass right where the visitor's hand was pressed on the opposite side, you never would know that feeling, not until they set you free. — Marisha Pessl

Following the pattern offered a kind of comfort, a quiet balance to working in the field during the day. The farmwork was coarse, exhausting, and largely a matter of faith - a farmer threw everything he had into the earth, but ultimately it wasn't up to him whether it rained or not. Sewing was different. Mabel knew if she was patient and meticulous, if she carefully followed the rules, that in the end when it was turned right-side out, it would be just how it was meant to be. A small miracle in itself, and one that life so rarely offered. — Eowyn Ivey

Popularity is exhausting. The life of the party almost always winds up in a corner with an overcoat over him. — Wilson Mizner

The TV schedule is fantastic. It allows you to have a life. Theater actors are so disciplined - especially if you're doing musicals, you have to be in shape physically, mentally, and have to be on your game all the time. That's exhausting. On TV, especially a sitcom, you have a lot of free time to play. — Neil Patrick Harris

Dear Sir, poor sir, brave sir." he read, "You are an experiment by the Creator of the Universe. You are the only creature in the entire Universe who has free will. You are the only one who has to figure out what to do next - and why. Everybody else is a robot, a machine. Some persons seem to like you, and others seem to hate you, and you must wonder why. They are simply liking machines and hating machines. You are pooped and demoralized, " read Dwayne. "Why wouldn't you be? Of course it is exhausting, having to reason all the time in a universe which wasn't meant to be reasonable. — Kurt Vonnegut

The problem with driving around Iceland is that you're basically confronted by a new soul-enriching, breath-taking, life-affirming natural sight every five goddamn minutes. It's totally exhausting. — Stephen Markley

To move from controlling to trusting life is like exhausting ourselves by trying to put our arms around a river until we realize we have to enter the river and let the current take us. — Mark Nepo

A visual experience is vitalizing. Whereas to write great poetry, to draw continuously on one's inner life, is not merely exhausting, it is to keep alight a consuming fire. — Kenneth Clark

I felt as if I were living just above the surface of my life. It was lonely and utterly exhausting trying to make sure that everything was perfect all the time. No truth left unsaid, no hand or surface unwashed. Whoever said that high school was the best time of our lives definitely did not have OCD. — Kristin Albright

The most exhausting thing in life is being insincere. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

In carrying on this hipster virus I live a locust-like existence, exhausting and shedding myself in ruination from one life to the next. — Nate Powell

False life is exhausting; Real Life is inexhaustible. — Guy Finley

Why does a man spend fifty years of his life in an occupation that is often painful? I once told a class I was teaching that writing is an intellectual contact sport, similar in some respects to football. The effort required can be exhausting, the goal unreached, and you are hurt on almost every play; but that doesn't deprive a man or a boy from getting peculiar pleasures from the game. — Irwin Shaw

Life at the top is financially rewarding, spiritually draining, physically exhausting, and short. — Peter Charles Newman

The conditions of writing change absolutely between the first novel and the second: the first is an adventure, the second is a duty. The first is like a sprint which leaves you exhausted and triumphant beside the track. With the second the writer has been transformed into a long-distance runner - the finishing tape is out of sight, at the end of life. He must guard his energies and plan ahead. A long endurance is more exhausting than a sprint, and less heroic. — Graham Greene

Because this is how it feels to live my life: scattered, fragmented, and exhausting. — Brigid Schulte

She [my mother] tapped my hand lightly with her fingers and, looking out the window, said, "You know, I've missed having a mother. It's a gaping hole. I think having a mother is one of the great things in life--one of the only things that can save you. I'm always looking for my mother and, frankly, Kitten, it's becoming exhausting, so I thought I'd ask you if you would be my mother. You just have that way about you. You're not really what anyone would call a typical daughter, but I think you have exactly what it takes to be a mother. Don't you think it's a good idea? — Kate Mulgrew

What a risk, Reuben thought. I could easily hit him over the head and rob the church of its gold candlesticks. He wondered how often Jim had done this kind of thing, or why Jim's life was such a round of sacrifice and exhausting work, how it was Jim could ladle up soup and corned beef hash every day for people who so often let him down, or go through the same ritual every morning at the altar, as if it really was a miracle when he consecrated the bread and wine and gave out "the Body of Christ" in tiny white wafers. — Anne Rice

People with lots of doubts sometimes find life more oppressive and exhausting than others, but they're more energetic - they aren't robots. — Antonio Tabucchi

A solution to many of the issues in this book, and one that would go a long way toward fixing American healthcare, is relatively clear: Treasure nurses. Hire more. Nurses are perennially the number-one most trusted profession in America, according to an annual Gallup poll rating honesty and ethical standards. They are called to an exhausting commitment in which mortals must sustain an unwavering grace at the edge of life and death, almost divinely slowing heartbeats, hurrying them along, or pounding them back into existence. Nurses are exceptional. So why aren't they treated accordingly? — Alexandra Robbins

I shall ask into my shell only those friends with whom I can be completely honest. I find I am shedding hypocrisy in human relationships. What a rest that will be! The most exhausting thing in life, I have discovered, is being insincere. That is why so much of social life is exhausting; one is wearing a mask. I have shed my mask. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Revolution and youth are closely allied. What can a revolution promise to adults? To some it brings disgrace, to others favor. But even that favor is questionable, for it affects only the worse half of life, and in addition to advantages it also entails uncertainty, exhausting activity and upheaval of settled habits.
Youth is substantially better off: it is not burdened by guilt, and the revolution can accept young people in toto. The uncertainty of revolutionary times is an advantage for youth, because it is the world of the fathers that is challenged. How exciting to enter into the age of maturity over the shattered ramparts of the adult world! — Milan Kundera

In People magazine, Madonna said her life has been exhausting since she started her world tour. She said there isn't a second of her life that isn't taken up looking after her family or thinking of her show - her day is filled with problems of work and family. Someone should tell her, everyone else calls that, life. — Jay Leno

Living life in separate compartments can lead to internal conflict and exhausting tension. — Russell M. Nelson

The most exhausting thing in life, I have discovered, is being insincere. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

I just slept for fifteen hours straight. Yes, writing a musical is THAT exhausting! — Christy Hall

Stop protesting the hand you've been dealt! Become partners with your life instead of making it an exhausting wrestling match. — Judith Orloff

A real love story is sometimes exhausting. A romance is deliberately constructed to yield a certain result; the ambiguities are trimmed out, so it's neater and more pleasing to our hearts. But you don't live a love story, you live a life. — Melissa Pritchard

By then I had moved often enough not to have the usual illusions about a clean slate or a fresh start or a new life. I knew that I could not escape myself. And the idea of beginning again, with no furniture and no friends, was exhausting. So my happiness then is hard to explain. I am tempted now to believe that entering the life one is meant to inhabit is a thrilling sensation and that is all. — Eula Biss

Passion. The life of an entrepreneur is occasionally exhilarating, and almost always exhausting. Only unbridled passion for the concept is likely to see you through the 17-hour days (month after month) and the painful mistakes that are part and parcel of the start-up process. — Tom Peters

My problem is I love sex. No joking I really love sex. Life without sex is unbearable for me. As a child my mum says I loved men and hated women. I use to smile at men when I was in the pram and offer them lollipops or sweeties. I guess it is in my genes, my little weakness. I can live without the Valium and Vodka but not my sex. To me my choice is simple men or Paradise and I love them both. I cannot make that choice. It is like there is some evil force driving me to flirt and sleep around. No one man has ever been enough for me and now I have to live like a nun in rehab. I am not bold I am just misunderstood. No, don't laugh it is an illness and an exhausting one I am so tired, so very tired. — Annette J. Dunlea

I received no praise for the rescue of this girl, only criticism for "moving the troops about and stirring up the people" and wasting the radio station's time and money. I was shaken by these complaints. A young girl had been in danger and yet going to her rescue was seen as "exhausting the people and draining the treasury". Just what was a woman's life worth in China? — Xinran

I am very active on the Internet. In 2007, I made one film every day and posted it on my website. That was a 365-day project, really exhausting, but I still put a lot of stuff on - from life, friends, my own life. — Jonas Mekas

How had he got here? Only a few minutes ago he'd been a kid, riding his bike to school, collecting comics, doing homework and watching TV. Over the years, a few trappings of adulthood had insinuated themselves into his life withoutmaking significant inroads. Real adult life seemed to exist over there, somewhere as distant and unreachable as Uranus. He had no idea how people crossed over to this place, or why - the demands of being grown up seemed exhausting. Look how I work all the time. See my silky girlfriend. Watch me exchange money for food. Admire my blood pressure. — Meg Rosoff

It's exhausting, tiptoeing around someone who barges into your life with good intentions. — Gretta Mulrooney

This is what happens to the brain of those living with mental illnesses (more accurately, "brain illnesses"). The brain does not function as it should; life is out of control. The brain alters our bodies; thoughts are distorted, emotions are unregulated, and behaviors we once thought could never occur happen. One of the most challenging, exhausting, and painful phenomena we do as humans is to live and survive with these changes in our minds. The toll it takes on an individual's body and the people in their lives is, tragically, often too much to bear.

-Dr. Daniel J. Reidenberg — Kevin Hines

Keeping secrets is exhausting. When your whole life turns into a secret, — Robin York

When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part. — George Bernard Shaw

I'm not panicking any more or worrying about the next job. It was exhausting and making me very unhappy, and I was missing out on life. — Kerry Condon

When I was growing up, people didn't tell me to slow down, to do less, to be calmer, or to practice being content.
In fact, people told me to do the opposite: be involved, challenge myself, stay busy, push through the pain, chase after my goals, swing for the fences, do more, make more, go all out.
But you wanna know something? When it comes to dealing with the hard stuff in life, it's the slowing down and remembering the basics that are most important. Also, all of those other words sound exhausting. — Chad Eastham

Focusing on and sustaining life activities...jobs, budgets housekeeping etc. takes from me. It is an exhausting struggle; a desperate attempt to tread water while drowning.
Life drains my well. Special interests fill it back up. I need that time, I need that filling, that relaxing, that decompressing, in order to accomplish other tasks in my life. — Jeannie Davide-Rivera

The normal Christian Life is not supposed to be an exhausting wrestling match with a dead man, but is an abundant, joy-filled life with God, salted with an occasional season of strong resistance from our archenemy. — Kris Vallotton

Think of me as the porter ... and consider the possiblity that life might be less exhausting if you unloaded some of your bags on to my empty trolley. — Susan Howatch

Today's competitiveness, so much imposed from without, is exhausting, not exhilarating; is unending-a part of one's social life, one's solitude, one's sleep, one's sleeplessness. — Louis Kronenberger

The word of God is a tree of life that offers us blessed fruit from each of its branches. It is like that rock which was struck open in the wilderness, from which all were offered spiritual drink. Be glad then that you are overwhelmed, and do not be saddened because he has overcome you. A thirsty person is happy when drinking, and not depressed, because the spring is inexhaustible. You can satisfy your thirst without exhausting the spring; then when you thirst again, you can drink from it once more. — Ephrem The Syrian

Avoiding our pain is needlessly exhausting. Pain can not be killed. When we attempt to bury our pain, it rises up from the grave of our emotions, haunting us, until we acknowledge its presence. We can heal our pain when we allow it to move through us. — Jaeda DeWalt

Christians will want to be in the vanguard in favoring ways of life that decisively break with the exhausting and joyless frenzy of consumerism. — Pope John Paul II

Henry had never felt so happy. Freshperson year had been one thing, an adventure, an exhilaration, all in all a success, but it had also been exhausting, a constant struggle and adjustment and tumult. Now he was locked in. Every day that summer had the same framework, the alarm at the same time, meals and workouts and shifts and SuperBoost at the same times, over and over, and it was that sameness, that repetition, that gave life meaning. He savored the tiny variations, the incremental improvements
tuna fish on his salad instead of turkey; tow extra reps on the bench press. Every move he made had purpose. — Chad Harbach

Just for the record, a nymphomaniac girlfriend might be great material for imagination, but in real life, trust me, having a nympho in your bed night after night is not as fantastic as it sounds. At worst, they are sick; at best they are exhausting, and in both cases they wear you out. — Carol Vorvain

I was very burned out after Buffy. It was exhausting. It took me from essentially 18 on the pilot to being 24 and married when we finished. That show was my life. I was doing movies on the hiatuses and on weekends, but I needed to explore and live that gypsy lifestyle. — Sarah Michelle Gellar

This was exhausting. If she was going to make this kind of emotional investment in someone, he should at least be a proper boyfriend. But for a casual fling? She could drive herself crazy. — Lauren Weisberger

We can have everything we want as long as what we want is a life spent searching for exhausting work that doesn't pay enough, shopping for things we don't need and sticking to a set of social and sexual rules that turn out, once you plough through the layers of trash and adverts, to be as rigid as ever. — Laurie Penny

When you spend your whole life traveling it does get really tedious and exhausting. — Hamilton Leithauser

At first parenthood was as I had expected, exhausting, sometimes heinous, and occasionally divine. I held my children close enough to feel them breathe, laugh, swallow. — Kelly Corrigan

The 'find it, fix it 'model of medicine doesn't work any more. The U.S. healthcare system is bankrupting the country, bankrolling the insurance companies and exhausting healthcare staff. And despite all that, we are ranked 50th in the world for life expectancy. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

Motherhood:
The most exhausting, emotional, rewarding
and life-enhancing journey a woman can take. — Charlotte Pearson

Will you have kids?"
"You make such an attractive case for the reproductive plunge. I don't know, Duncan. Childhood is so exhausting."
"As a parent?"
"I mean as the child. Not sure it's fair to drop somebody else into life without giving them a choice in the matter."
"You'll find it's kind of tough to canvass the opinion of sperm."
"I prefer asking the eggs - they're more articulate. Anyway, aren't you the guy who's always bemoaning the future of humanity? Saying how the worst jerks always have millions of babies, meaning the world gets worse every generation?"
"Exactly why decent people need to have kids. — Tom Rachman

The physical heart, which houses the spiritual heart, beats about 100,000 times a day, pumping two gallons of blood per minute and over 100 gallons per hour. If one were to attempt to carry 100 gallons of water (whose density is lighter than blood) from one place to another, it would be an exhausting task. Yet the human heart does this every hour of every day for an entire lifetime without respite. The vascular system transporting life-giving blood is over 60,000 miles long - more than two times the circumference of the earth. So when we conceive of our blood being pumped throughout our bodies, know that this means that it travels through 60,000 miles of a closed vascular system that connects all the parts of the body - all the vital organs and living tissues - to this incredible heart. — Hamza Yusuf

I could use a little monotony in my life. Spontaneity is exhausting. — A Meredith Walters

The second album was emotionally exhausting and my life felt like it had become very serious at a very young age. — Delta Goodrem

White people don't have that problem, they get to go through life never having to fit into a box, and it's really more so true for white men because even just being a woman, you sort of have to walk around other people's assumptions of you and it's so exhausting and there's a sense, especially among young people of wanting to just live your life, not having to wear the weight of that pressure - pressure that people of color feel, that gay people of color feel, that women of color feel. — Justin Simien

I think it's also different when you're younger, too and your whole life is exposed. You know, it is probably exhausting and a little spiritually depleting, but you just find ways to fill up and do things For me it's simple things. — Kate Walsh

Why do I find the fantasy - husband, family, kids - exhausting instead of alluring? Is there something wrong with me? Do I have a life? — Caroline Knapp

With all these occurrences of death facing me, I thought about issues of freedom. If government projects the idea that we, as people inhabiting this particular land mass, have freedom, then for the rest of our lives we will go out and find what appear to be the boundaries and smack against them like a heart against the rib cage. If we reveal boundaries in the course of our movements, then we will expose the inherent lie in the use of the word freedom. I want to keep breathing and moving until I arrive at a place where motion and strength and relief intersect. I don't know what's ahead of me in the course of my life and this civilization. I just don't feel I have reached the necessary things inside my history that would ease the pressure in my skull and in my future and in my present. It is exhausting, living in a population where people don't speak up if what they witness doesn't directly threaten them. — David Wojnarowicz

Holding myself to perfectionistic standards, I used to think I had to become lifelong friends with everyone who entered my life. This was exhausting, and I now know it's not true. I believe the old saying that people come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime. (127) — Jenni Schaefer

When a creature is so badly constituted (perhaps in nature that being is man) that he cannot love unless he suffers and that he must suffer to learn truth, the life of such a being becomes in the end very exhausting. The happy years are those that are wasted; we must wait for suffering to drive us to work. — Marcel Proust

A life too full of excitement is an exhausting life, in which continually stronger stimuli are needed to give the thrill that has come to be thought an essential part of pleasure. — Bertrand Russell

Playing it safe and tiptoeing through life is exhausting. Keeping all of your gifts trapped inside tires the crap out of you. It takes the same amount of effort to create something extraordinary as it takes to create something ordinary. — Lysa Mateu

I was me. I thought what I thought. I liked what I liked. And I didn't hide much of anything. Life was exhausting enough with all the ups and downs and bullshit people kept trying to feed you. Expending that kind of effort for essentially no purpose seemed a ridiculous waste of energy. — Kristen Ashley

Men of Oregon, I invite you to become students of your events. Running, one might say, is basically an absurd past-time upon which to be exhausting ourselves. But if you can find meaning, in the kind of running you have to do to stay on this team, chances are you will be able to find meaning in another absurd past-time: life. — Bill Bowerman

The most exhausting effort in my life has been to suppress my own nature in order to make it serve my biggest plans. — Albert Camus

"I might be entertaining the idea of tamping down my nihilism. Just a bit. Not because life is not meaningless - I think that's inarguable. It's just that the constant awareness of its pointlessness is exhausting. I wouldn't mind being oblivious again. I'd love to feel the wind in my face and think, just for minute, that I'm not going to crash into the rocks."
"You're saying you'd like to be happy. — Daryl Gregory

The poems ... are moments when I had the intensity to see, and the energy to build, some careful analog that completed the seeing ... All I have been left is the exhausting habit of trying to tack up the slack in my life with words. — Samuel R. Delany

My world is about FEELings. Sometimes, these feelings run so deep i fear i will drown.
Creatively, it's a dream to be so sensitive. In real life, it's exhausting, as i tread water to keep myself from sinking. — Jaeda DeWalt

Among other things, Kathryn knew, grief was physically exhausting. — Anita Shreve

I carry an invisible box of jerseys with me that say "Team Ian" on the front. My goal is to convince everyone I meet to become my fan and prove it by putting on my "Team Ian" jersey. If they do, then for at least ten minutes I feel like I've won their approval and love. If I have a run of people who don't put it on, I can fall into a rut I have visited so often I should have it decorated and furnished. For me, life is like one long job interview in which I'm trying to impress everyone I meet enough to hire me. The routine is exhausting, mostly for everyone else.
I confessed this nutty practice to my spiritual director. He smiled, put his arm around my shoulder, and said, "I never trust a man without a limp. — Ian Morgan Cron

When you're a French woman and you have a lot of Latin blood, you can be very dramatic. It definitely makes your personal life exciting - and exhausting. — Josephine De La Baume

To me, it was a human story about what it costs to be yourself, and the reward too. It costs personal fear to be authentic but the reward is integrity, and by that I mean a soul fully integrated, no difference between his act and his actual person. Having integrity is about being the same person on the inside that we are on the outside, and if we don't have integrity, life becomes exhausting. I wonder how many people get tempted by the gains they can make by playing a role, only to pay for those temptations in public isolation. — Donald Miller

No point in thinking," she said briskly, "you just have to get on with life." (She really was turning into Miss Woolf.) "We only have one after all, we should try and do our best. We can never get it right, but we must try." (The transformation was complete.) "What if we had a chance to do it again and again," Teddy said, "until we finally did get it right? Wouldn't that be wonderful?" "I think it would be exhausting. — Kate Atkinson

How exhausting, Clary thought, to fight all your life and then be expected to continue that fight even when your life was over. — Cassandra Clare